Brandon Martin at Cornell University
Brandon Martin Reports Back to Erskine
from Cornell
ITHACA, N.Y.– By day, Erskine
College Goldwater Scholar Brandon Martin slams particles together
to see what happens. By night he hangs out with friends in a fraternity
house.
Officially, Martin is spending
the summer at Cornell University assisting professors with a high-tech
research project. Unofficially, he's getting his first taste of graduate
school at a larger university.
Martin, a rising Erskine senior, son
of Mr. and Mrs. W.P. Martin of York, S.C., is spending most of this
summer working on a research project called "Electron/Positron
Identification."
Positrons are very small naturally
occurring particles, but Martin explains that for this project, "we
have to create the positrons by slamming the electrons into a tungsten
plate." He is using a piece of scientific
equipment at Cornell called the synchrotron.
"The basic idea of the Cornell
synchrotron is this: We start with an incredibly expensive, souped-up
TV tube," says Martin. "Just like the TV in your house,
this machine fires electrons, but here, we ‘catch’ them
and accelerate them to close to the speed of light (300,000,000 meters/second).
We then use magnets and super conductors to bend and focus the streams
of particles and eventually slam them into each other."
Trying hard not to leave non-science
majors behind in his attempt to explain his work, Martin continues,
"When they collide, all sorts of crazy stuff comes out of there,
sometimes things humans have never seen before, sometimes things we
can't explain."
Martin has a fairly specific task
in the research project. "We are trying to identify electrons
more efficiently, so I will be re-examining the criterion that the
computers use to decide if we have a positive match," he says.
"We have to do this because we
have these events taking place millions of times a second and the
computers have to decide whether we keep them or not. We can't keep
all of them, so we set up cuts.
"We only keep a fraction of a
percent of what happens inside the detector. The detector is like
a two-meter-across soda can with millions of golden strings, thinner
than hair, running along the axis. When these particles collide and
scatter off, they ‘tickle’ these strings and provide us
with a ‘photograph’ of what happened."
Martin’s typical work day
starts at 9 a.m. with a meeting with his mentors, Dan Cronin-Hennessy
and Mark Palmer. "They talk with me about what I will be doing
that day and sometimes about long-range goals," says Martin.
"Then I sit in front of a computer terminal and make plots of
data. It is a lot of fun and I am learning an incredible amount about
particle physics."
Obviously Martin is well occupied
during the day, but what does he do at night? Living in a vacant fraternity
house with 12 other people–students from all over the country–he
shares the tasks of cooking and cleaning with his housemates. The
group usually eats at about 8 p.m., so he usually leaves work at 7
p.m.
"At night if it gets hot, we
take the TV out on the porch and all watch movies together. I don’t
think I’ve ever heard of a random group like this getting along
so well."
The countryside around Ithaca is known
for its beauty, and Martin is taking this in, too. "This past
Saturday I went hiking on the Cayuga Trail. It was a nice tour of
the local gorges and I got to see the ‘shared’ gardens.
I think that these people buy a few feet of garden space and plant
their own vegetables–a neat concept."
Reflecting on his experience at Cornell
thus far, Martin says, "I think living with all of these people
and learning their different ways of doing things has been incredibly
rewarding, but I think the most rewarding thing is learning what to
expect from graduate school and what larger universities are like."
